I've been very dissatisfied with this Seagate 7200.10 320GB SATAII about the noise level which seems to remind me of some old 10-20GB drives far from usual Seagate noise level standards. Operation noise is about par with Maxtor DiamondMax 9 but of course it doesn't support AAM either so you can't do anything about the noise. However I searched around the net and found this thread pretty interesting as many others seems to agree with the drives being very noisy while others think they are very silent. In pretty much middle of the thread you'll find a post by a 4x320GB 7200.10 owner that compared his drives if there would be a difference among them, one of them turned out to be a lot more noisy, had a faint high pitch whine during idle and operation noise was also remarkably louder, aprox ~60% by his subjective opinion. Now he also took a pic of the drive motors:
silent motor
non-silent motor
I've got the "non-silent motor" myself and I think it's very loud, I'm thinking of returning or selling it (depends how nice the online store where I bought it from is). Simply cuz I don't like a very loud HDD that also produces audible "clicking" operation noise from simple tasks such as downloading or uploading files from it and sometimes also at idle. What's gotten into Seagate these days, hiding a factory somewhere in Singapore producing budget 7200.10 not following the exact specs for this product, I wouldn't be suprised. I also sent a complain to Seagate support about it, will be interesting to hear what they've got to say.
If you have got a Seagate 7200.10 I'd be happy if you could give some feedback about it and perhaps fill in info about it like this for example:
Product code: ST3320620AS
Manufactured in: Singapore
Firmware: 3.AAE
Date Code: (sorry I forgot to check this) should be a 4-digit code
Motor: Non-silent
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